Devouring the indomitable spirit of Bambi Lake

San Francisco icon Bambi Lake’s posthumous collection of poetry hit bookstore shelves a week after Trans March organizers demanded accountability from the city over Pride Weekend police violence.

Titled Devour Me, Again: Collected Poems, this revival of Lake’s work couldn’t have arrived at a better time. With a DA intent on prosecuting progressive Palestinian solidarity activists, dampening public political expressions of trans rage and joy, and targeting the queer underground nightlife’s reclamation of public space, this verbal visitation by one of San Francisco’s most controversial trans punk chanteuses provides an escape into sincere yet delusional glamour bordered by the rough contours of Lake’s life.

Fresh from Nightboat Books—with a foreword by local punk legend Brontez Purnell, recently republished in The Paris Review—Devour Me, Again showcases Lakes wry playfulness, rhyme, and raw rage. It reprints Lake standard “The Golden Age of Hustlers” as well as my personal favorite, “You Don’t Love Me So I’m Ugly, And I’m Going to Kill Myself, And It’s All Your Fault.” The tone seems spat out by a sophisticated teenage Sylvia Plath who has seen and done it all. Lake’s writing is here for us to devour, truly, again.

“It’s a compilation of everything that we know about,” says collection editor August Bernadicou. It’s the poems from [2004 collection] Smash and Grab. It’s the poetry from [1996 memoir] The Unsinkable Bambi Lake. It’s her song lyrics. Someone sent me a bunch of demo tapes that she made in the ’90s. So we pulled the lyrics from those songs. We include two interviews I did with her, one from a long-lost tape and then one I did in 2019.”

Bernadicou heads The LGBTQ History Project, which conducts extensive amounts of interviews with queer elders who often sit at the margins of queer history, either because they are too punk, too thorny, or just too controversial. Bambi Lake was one of many of his interviews, and she and Bernadicou became intimately linked until her passing. 

Who was Bambi Lake? Bernadicou describes her lovingly as a chanteuse performer, a poet, a chameleon, a sex worker, an actress surfacing on the outer edges of the Cockettes. When he met her, she was homeless and on the outs with much of her community. While lake changed Bernadicou’s life, their first meeting was traumatic and made a deep impression. Carrying a copy of Lake and Alvin Orloff’s co-authored The Unsinkable Bambi Lake in his backpack, 18-year-old Bernadicou and his sister set out to find Lake—and did so in Union Square.

She was passed out there. When he woke her, she began screaming obscenities and tried to steal his phone. he reached out a year later when she was sober, and their relationship bloomed. While she began rebuilding her stage career, often to sold-out crowds, much of her relationship with her community had been damaged by substance misuse and mental health problems. Some local venues and bars had banned her, and she had burned many bridges. Bernadicou played a role in repairing all of that before her death in 2020. 

Devour Me, Again’s publishing journey is as queer as a writer could hope it to be. Through happenstance, one of the original publishers of Unsinkable Bambi Lake reached out to Bernadicou for a different project. They realized they both were in deep with Bambi Lake’s artistry. They agreed that it was time for her work to be reintroduced to a wider readership. Bernadicou made a move that was as every bit as go-getting as his entire approach to oral history and seeking out Bambi Lake. 

“I messaged this guy on Grindr who I knew was involved with the Poetry Center in New York. I was like, OK, I have all this poetry by this trans, punk, speed freak, prostitute, rock and roll chanteuse. Can you help me get somewhere with it? Because I was just going to do it myself. Then I got introduced to Nightboat and they said yes. We’ve been working on it for a couple of years.”

Lake’s presence will manifest Thu/30, 6pm, for a reading in the Tenderloin at The Compton’s Cafeteria Riot! venue. Cheekily titled, “Devour Me, Again, Again: Words of Wisdom from Bambi Lake,” which features an array of underground queer literary and nightlife talent, including Purnell, Brittany Snears, Fauxnique, Donna Personna, Stanley Frank, and more.  

The lineup of well-knowns is a fitting tribute to Lake’s life and work. She often expressed to Bernadicou that she had failed—she should have been more famous, with a wider audience spanning San Francisco, Berlin, and back to her hometown of New York. “I told her, Bambi, you were too early,” Bernadicou said. “You were too hardcore. The world wasn’t ready for her, but she just had so much resentment that she wasn’t famous. It’s just sad because she was 68 years old, 69 years old, 70 years old talking about how she thought she was a failure.

“She wasn’t David Bowie like she wanted, but to people like me she changed the world and she changed my life.”

During our Zoom interview, Bernadicou drew my attention to items in his New York City apartment that his LGBTQ History Project interviewees had left him—including artifacts of Lake’s legacy on his “Bambi Wall.” 

“My favorite Bambi line is ‘I find it hard to go to the beach or golden gate park/ because nature is so beautiful it reminds me that I don’t have a boyfriend,” he said. “I was like whoa I feel the same way. But maybe not that intense. I’ve always liked underdogs. I like people who are fighters. I like people who are determined, who want to be famous at a young age. I always really relate to that.

“I have her initials tattooed on my arm like a sailor. She was so unique. She was doing things at a time when other people weren’t doing them. You know, she was trans. She was punk. She was a drug addict. She was a prostitute. These are all things that are like really in right now. But she was doing it in 1970. I want the world to know that she was a badass, that she was a sweetheart, that she cared, that she was depressed and bipolar and sad. I just want the world to know about her.”

With Devour Me, Again, the world certainly will know the unforgettable Bambi Lake. 

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